4 Things I Learned From my Dad

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Screws Are Better Than Nails

In my house, nails got little respect. My dad grew up in Panama as part of the community that built and operated the Panama Canal (my grandfather was in charge of maintaining some of the complex machinery that operated the locks). It was a world of highly skilled people-machinists, engineers and mechanics-and they shared what my dad calls a "culture of competence." By the age of 18 my father was a fully licensed machinist, repairing the huge dredges used to keep the canal open and machining new parts for crippled ships.

In that world of steel and great machines, rough carpentry was considered a fairly minor skill (and wooden structures never lasted long in the tropical climate anyway). As a result, my dad always saw nails as a cheap shortcut-often necessary, but rarely something to be proud of. Nails bend and break and work loose over time. Any really serious job requires a serious fastener-one with threads. One of the first tools my father taught me to use was an old-fashioned bit and brace. He always took special pride in precisely countersinking the screw heads so they would lie flush with the surface. I repaired an old wooden toboggan one time, and I can remember excitedly waiting for my dad to get home from work so that I could show him my row of perfectly seated wood screws.

Never Throw Out Wood

My dad always had a pile of wood scraps-the stumpy ends of 2 x 4s, odd angles of plywood, leftover strips of molding-in the garage or under his workbench. You never know when you might need that piece, he'd say. And sure enough, most of those scraps got used sooner or later. The smallest strips were pressed into service as shims or paint stirrers. Larger pieces might serve as wheelbarrow ramps. And eventually anything not screwed down wound up as part of some childhood engineering project. We lived in a typical '60s suburban neighborhood; kids were everywhere. And we were always building things: One plank, plus two 2 x 4s, plus one disassembled pair of roller skates (belated apologies to my sister) equaled one go-kart. A small triangle of plywood nailed high in a tree constituted a "lookout." And forts were our forte. One memorable scrap-wood structure was held together entirely with C-clamps-which certainly simplified remodeling. My dad never seemed to mind seeing his leftover wood disappear into these projects. (He was a little less happy to find his entire collection of C-clamps out in the rain, however.)

Build Everything to Last

When I was about nine years old, we moved to a bigger house with a much bigger basement. Which meant we needed a bigger workbench. My dad was determined to get it right. First of all, he built it high, since he's a tall man and didn't want to bend over while he worked. And he built it strong, using stout 4 x 4s for the legs and a collar of 2 x 6s to support the inch-thick plywood top. It had a massive metalworking vise as well as a wood vise. And of course no nails were harmed in its construction (see above): Everything was held together with beefy 1/2-inch hex bolts.

That bench was bombproof. Over the coming years it supported the construction of numerous projects, as well as the disassembly of several Briggs & Stratton engines (one or two of them actually ran again upon reassembly). Its surface became a map of pits, gouges, oil stains and hard little puddles of epoxy. Dad never complained, no matter how many half-finished projects I left strewn across it. When my parents finally moved from that house, we left the bench behind for the new owners. I hope it's there still, standing up stoutly to generation after generation of DIYers.

Make It Plumb and Level

To my dad, the level is a truly sublime tool. It ensures that your construction is properly oriented not just to the things around it, but to the world itself. Get that little spirit bubble precisely lined up and you know that the center of the earth is straight down.

Having been raised in the tropics, my dad didn't see snow or ice until he was almost 30 and moved to the States. Nonetheless, he taught himself to ice skate and took to it with a vengeance. So when he planned to build a patio behind our home he decreed that it would double as a skating rink in the winter. He spent days stringing level-lines across the worksite and checking and rechecking the elevation of the raised redwood lip that encircled it. That patio was as flat as a griddle. And sure enough, lined with polyethylene, it held just enough water to make a flawless skating surface.

My dad would have made that patio dead level even if we'd lived in Florida. To him, doing work precisely and with care is an end in itself. He often told me about the men he grew up with, fellow machinists and mechanics. To them, doing a job well-better than it needed to be done-was a core ethical principle. He took pride in his craftsmanship. "The best thing you could say about a man," my dad often recalls, "is that he was a good mechanic." And that was all you needed to say. But my dad also taught me that craftsmanship isn't just about how you build things. He brought that quality to everything: working in the business world, writing books, raising kids, grilling steaks. Craftsmanship is the respect we pay to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the material world we try to shape and improve.